No limits in a political blood sport

Just when you thought federal politics couldn’t sink any lower, it again demonstrated its capacity to explore new ocean trenches this week as politicians contemplated the risks that one of their own might be driven to suicide, then took steps to ensure that, if it happened, someone else would be blamed.

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Thomson’s address had long been awaited, even if there had been low expectations he could say anything likely to sway people’s views on his “guilt" or “innocence" regarding the allegations he faced.

Many people just wanted to hear him talk about the more lurid allegations against him.

In the brutal world of politics, the very fact he was talking at all was merely part of the relentless power plays about who has the numbers in the House of Representatives.

Thomson’s vote – as Speaker Peter Slipper is sidelined with his own problems – is crucial for
Julia Gillard
’s holding the numbers in the House of Representatives and, therefore, holding on to government.

If he were to resign from Parliament, it would immediately cause a byelection, which could (not definitely, because of the uncertainty about Slipper) see Abbott get the numbers to form government.

The Coalition has, therefore been pushing to get Gillard to cast him off.

But since the release of the Fair Work Australia report on the Health Services Union and its findings against Thomson over alleged misuse of union funds, the opposition has also been pushing to spread the mud from the union to the government, via Thomson, as much as possible.

Crossbench MPs have been under intense pressure to support moves to suspend Thomson from Parliament and also to find ways for Parliament to discipline one of its own.

It became clear in the past couple of weeks that the crossbenches wouldn’t support a move to suspend Thomson when he faced no criminal or civil proceedings.

So the strategy switched to trying to find any evidence that Thomson may have transgressed Parliament’s own rules – either over the obligations for members to declare financial interests, or by misleading the House in his address.

The opposition claimed both sorts of transgressions this week after Thomson’s speech and referred him to the House of Representatives’ powerful privileges committee, which does have the power to suspend an MP. Two other committees appeared set to investigate other fallout from the HSU/Thomson affair.

But just as the whole Thomson drama seemed to be reaching a parliamentary crescendo, the flesh and blood cost of such a controversy was also becoming evident to MPs on both sides of politics, and to journalists.

Liberal MP
Mal Washer
emerged to express what many were saying: that there was great concern for Thomson’s state of mind. That he was fragile and under intense pressure.

After being confronted in his office on Wednesday with some of the more lurid allegations by a team from A Current Affair, Thomson himself posed the question that was now on everyone’s minds:

“Is this about trying to push someone to the brink?" he asked a hastily arranged press conference.

A couple of hours later, the Opposition Leader changed tack when he moved to censure the Prime Minister. “At a human level, I have a great deal of sympathy for the member for Dobell," he said.

“All of us in this chamber, including members on this side of the House, have a great deal of sympathy at a human level for the member for Dobell. We have no sympathy, though, for a government and for a Prime Minister who have put him in this position by insisting that he remain in the Parliament when the honourable course of action for him would be to resign."

He went even further on Friday, clearly putting responsibility for Thomson’s wellbeing in the hands of the Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister, he said, was preventing the sidelined Labor MP from doing the right thing for himself and his family because she was “clinging" to his vote.

“At the moment, as far as the Prime Minister is concerned, it’s not Craig Thomson’s welfare that matters, it’s her political welfare that matters," he told the Nine Network’s Today program.

“And that’s why the best thing for everyone – it would take the pressure off him, it would take the pressure off his family – would be for him to leave the Parliament."

The only problem is, it is not up to the Prime Minister to say whether Thomson stays or goes, nor does she have some power to accept, or not accept his vote.

The opposition’s approach this week has been very different in tone to that taken by Abbott during a condolence motion for
Greg Wilton
, a young Labor MP who took his life in 2000.

“[Wilton] hated the character assassination which sadly is so much a part of the public discourse, and the private conversation here, and for which all of us bear a heavy responsibility," Abbott said at the time.

In a debate about the affair on Tuesday, independent MP
Tony Windsor
spoke of going through a similar experience of a hung parliament in NSW in the early 1990s “where a very good premier, in my view, a man called
Nick Grei
ner, was found to be corrupt by the ICAC, the corruption body of NSW.

“There were calls then, as there are now, by the then state leader of the opposition – the attack dog in those days, the Tony Abbott of his day –
Bob Carr
, who is now in the Senate, for the removal of Nick Greiner.

“The federal leader of the Liberal Party,
John Hewson
, was also calling for the removal of Nick Greiner because it was doing damage to the party. Members of the Liberal Party in NSW themselves were calling for his removal.

“There was talk of a no confidence motion being moved against the premier. It was my vote that put the Liberals in power in that particular parliament. I can remember talking to Nick Greiner on the Sunday night and I told him that if a no confidence motion was moved by the other crossbenchers or by Bob Carr then I would not be supportive of it.

“I made the point that the reason for that, even though I was upset over the corruption charge as I am upset over the Fair Work Australia findings, was he had not exhausted due process.

“He said to me, and I remember his words quite clearly, ‘It is too late. They want me to go.’ He resigned the next day as premier . . . and about a week later, he was found not guilty on appeal."

Windsor and former House speaker Labor MP
Harry Jenkins
both made eloquent speeches that day contemplating the questions the Thomson case posed for MPs, who are fully cognisant of voters howling for some sort of parliamentary censure of Thomson but who also genuinely believe that these are matters for the court.

For his efforts, Windsor has been accused of hypocrisy because, in 2005, he made allegations under parliamentary privilege that two fellow parliamentarians had tried to bribe him, allegations that never led to prosecution.

The clear difference, however, is that while all sorts of allegations have been made by and against MPs over the years, Thomson is the only one in living memory who has been pressured to resign before the allegations are even tested in court.

The fact that his resignation would bring down the government has made the pressure all that much more lurid and unbearable.

But at a human level, as the Opposition Leader would say, there remains a man subject to unprecedented pressure, and an apparently unresolvable dilemma for the Parliament about what to do.